In clinical laboratories or pharmaceutical companies and at research service provider facilities, a large number of different samples are processed every day and prepared for histological investigations by scientists, physicians, and pathologists. The usual procedure is to take the sample from the patient, embed the sample in, for example, paraffin, and then cut it into thin sections using microtomes.
The thin sections are, as a rule, placed onto specimen slides and covered with a thin glass or plastic plate for protection from environmental influences. To enhance diagnosis capabilities, the samples are often stained with different staining techniques before coverslipping.
In order to meet ever more stringent requirements in clinical and pathological histology and cytology, and to maintain competitiveness despite enormous time and cost pressure, many activities previously performed manually by laboratory personnel are being streamlined with the aid of automatic equipment.
For example, so-called stainers (automatic staining machines) have become known for staining the samples. Coverslipping of the specimen slides is facilitated by coverslipping machines.
It is known from DE 101 44 042 A1 and DE 101 44 989 A1 to connect a stainer, via a transfer module, to a coverslipping machine and to transport stained sections automatically for coverslipping. In this fashion, a large number of coverslipped samples are produced at short time intervals and are made available, at the output end of the system, for further investigation.
Subsequent investigation of the samples by physicians, scientists, and pathologists requires substantially more time, however, and also occurs more irregularly than the production of coverslipped samples on specimen slides using the system described above. Even automatically operating digital scanning devices, which convert the samples into high-resolution “digital slides,” take between two and 20 minutes to scan a specimen slide, depending on the size of the specimen. It is common to have a backup of finished coverslipped specimen slides at the output end of the coverslipping machine.